I got my first engineering manager role 14 months ago. I was not prepared for this specific flavor of exhausted.
As an IC, burnout for me was about personal output. Am I producing. Am I keeping up. The anxiety was mostly turned inward.
As a manager the burnout is... diffuse? I'm not doing the thing, I'm enabling other people to do the thing. So the exhaustion doesn't always look like I'm tired of my work. It looks like I stopped caring whether my team's work goes well. I'd be in a 1:1 and realize I was tracking the conversation but not actually present. Going through the motions of being supportive.
The dangerous part is that you can fake it as a manager for a lot longer than as an IC. Nobody is looking at your lines of code. Your team gets the deliverables done and you look functional from the outside. The decay is internal and slow.
Signs I noticed too late: Zero energy for developing people. The thing I used to find meaningful started feeling like a chore. I stopped advocating for my team in ways that required any friction. If it took more than one email I'd let it drop. I started dreading 1:1s. These are 30-minute conversations with people I genuinely like. That was alarming.
What I did: told my skip-level (which felt vulnerable, but she was great). Took two Fridays off in a row, no slack. Did almost nothing useful. Then restructured my calendar to have two deep-work blocks I don't let anyone book over, just so I have something that doesn't feel like service work.
Still not 100%. But the caring came back a bit. Turns out I needed something in my week that was just mine.
Anyone else manage through burnout? Curious how you handled not letting it affect your reports.